Archive for November, 2015

By the end of September Google released Android 6 aka “Marshmallow”. Besides the new doze mode — which is a huge battery saver — and a lot of other nifty stuff Google completely revised Android’s permission system: Instead of forcing the user to acknowledge a bunch of detailed permissions upfront while installing the app, installation and update now pass silently and the apps requests the permissions in the moment they are required for the first time. To make this work the app needs to be build natively for Android 6.

The newest release of uPod — version 4.5 — does exactly this. And the best thing: I’ve overworked uPod’s permissions, so that it doesn’t contain any critical once at all. So when you install uPod on Marshmallow you won’t be asked to acknowledge a single permission — not during installation and also not later on.

Besides native Marshmallow support uPod 4.5 brings the following changes:

When subscribing to a podcast only the latest episode is delivered to your “New”-section (instead of all episodes like before).

When streaming an episode, the download notification in the status bar is no longer visible.

The drag handle in the play list has been updated to more clearly state it’s purpose.

On Fri­day and Sat­ur­day I’ve joined the 6th Podlove Pod­caster Work­shopt 2015b in Berlin in the rooms of Wiki­me­dia Ger­many and enjoyed two days full of dis­cus­sion related to pod­cast pro­duc­tion and con­sume. Yes­ter­day I took the chance to present uPod. Though there were mainly active pod­cast­ers in the audi­ence I’ve received a lot of pos­i­tive res­o­nance. Thanks for this and all the valu­able feedback.